11 July 2009

A Brian May wig and a stale haddock, please

At least I had fun planning imaginary revenge, working out in detail how to disguise myself from the CCTV - East St market has a stall specialising in wigs. I savoured pretend revenge as I pictured him trying to drive off his taxi the next morning with four slashed tyres and an inexplicable smell coming from the back seat.

Clearly the owner of this bike (above right), a friendly courier whose kaleidoscopically decorated fixie we stopped to admire on the way home, has had similar experiences.

Off to check out a new cycle-cafe now and roam Deptford in search of cake-related mayhem. Hopefully lighter-hearted posts to come. Cycle carefully folks.

7 comments:

Great site. I've only recently started cycling my 30 mile round trip from Bromley to Central London and found your pages really useful thanks. Despite just a few weeks in the saddle I've already had my fair share of run-ins with drivers. One particularly nasty incident with a lorry that overtook me and antother cyclist and then swung left into a turn. He saw us but didn't seem to care. What's to be done? Do the police take complaints seriously?

No Police don't take complaints seriously. You may get your incident added to a statistics list for future analysis but apart from that they're too busy dealing with other things. At least they are in Bristol (Cycling City). They're busy warning and ticketing cyclists riding on the pavement, but too busy to pay any attention to the cars parked in the cycle lanes on the same roads.

Usually what happens is you get a polite formula response from Taxi.Complaints@pco.org.uk saying they take the conduct of their drivers very seriously etc and the individual concerned has been notified. In other words, nothing happens.

Still, I bet he was stuck in jams all today boring his passengers to death, and we had a great day out on our bikes, so I'll count that as my revenge!

I have noticed more and more incidents with taxis this summer. Maybe because there are more cyclists on the road than before.

I find that Hackney Carriages are outright belligerent, while bloody Addy Lee and co are just plain good old fashioned hooligan sociopaths who just can't bloody drive.

I would also like to point out that I would like to kill several cyclists too. The rapid growth in the number of riders has brought in a lot of people who actually cannot ride a bike in a straight line, are unaware of their surrounds, the rules of the road and other cyclists.